We are finally starting to see some real technological
breakthroughs in the area of mobile storage after a long period of stagnation.
2004 saw the rise of speedy 7200RPM hard drives while this year saw the
introduction of perpendicular
recording which allows data to be recorded in a smaller area. Just
yesterday, DailyTech reported on Seagate's hybrid solution
which pairs a traditional hard drive with perpendicular recording technology to
256MB of non-volatile flash for better performance, increased battery life and
faster booting in Windows
Vista.

Today, PQI is showing off new drives that mimic Samsung's 32GB Flash-SSD.
PQI, with the help of Samsung NAND flash memory chips, has new 64GB IDE and
64GB SATA 2.5"
storage solutions for mobile users. The drives, which are due for release in
August, are by nature more rugged, lighter, cooler and more efficient than
traditional hard drives with a spinning disc. And best of all, there are
absolutely no moving part so no more listening to your hard drive whir while
you’re typing away and no more clicking and thrashing as you open up Photoshop
or perform other disk-intensive operations.

Pricing has not been announced on the new 64GB IDE and SATA 2.5" drives, but rest assured
that the new drives will be many times more expensive than even the fastest 7200RPM hard
drives on the market today. As the market matures and more players enter
the fray, we are sure to see a steady fall in prices. In fact, Samsung predicts
that the global market for NAND flash based drives will increase from $540M USD in 2006 to over $4.5 billion USD in 2010. With growth like that,
there will always be a premium for NAND-based disks over traditional hard
drives, but the price differential should be much more manageable than it is
today.

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"Unlike DRAM, flash memory chips have a limited lifespan. Further, different flash chips have a different number of write cycles before errors start to occur. Flash chips with 300,000 write cycles are common, and currently the best flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block (with 8,000 blocks per chip). Now, just because a flash chip has a given write cycle rating, it doesn't mean that the chip will self-destruct as soon as that threshold is reached. It means that a flash chip with a 1 million Erase/Write endurance threshold limit will have only 0.02 percent of the sample population turn into a bad block when the write threshold is reached for that block. The better flash SSD manufacturers have two ways to increase the longevity of the drives: First, a "balancing" algorithm is used. This monitors how many times each disk block has been written. This will greatly extend the life of the drive. The better manufacturers have "wear-leveling" algorithms that balance the data intelligently, avoiding both exacerbating the wearing of the blocks and "thrashing" of the disk: When a given block has been written above a certain percentage threshold, the SSD will (in the background, avoiding performance decreases) swap the data in that block with the data in a block that has exhibited a "read-only-like" characteristic. Second, should bad blocks occur, they are mapped out as they would be on a rotating disk. With usage patterns of writing gigabytes per day, each flash-based SSD should last hundreds of years, depending on capacity. If it has a DRAM cache, it'll last even longer. "

absolutely true but, based on those same calculations, storage space is going to diminish much more rapidly than with a rotating disk so, even though overall longevity will be similar, space is going to diminish more quickly. Just something else to keep in mind.

I have not had a hard drive last me more then 5-7 years before they fail. So the deminish rate on a HDD seems to go from 100% to 0%. If they dont outright fail in 5-7 years you need to replace them anyways due to size and speed limitations.

So if these flash drives can last hundreds of years I think we are ok, even if their capacity drops a little.

quote: I have not had a hard drive last me more then 5-7 years before they fail. So the deminish rate on a HDD seems to go from 100% to 0%. If they dont outright fail in 5-7 years you need to replace them anyways due to size and speed limitations.

I'm very sorry if that's been your experience with hard drives. I've never had a hard drive fail on me -- EVER -- going all the way back to my first 50MB hard drive.

I definitely agree with you on your second point, though. That's been my experience: size and speed always dictate my new hard drive purchases.